10/24/2011 @ 9:00AM

Map Quest

Before writing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of his fabled isle and referred to it often while scribbling the tale, stating that maps possessed the power of “infinite, eloquent suggestion.” To W. Graham Arader III, a New York and Philadelphia-based dealer in the business of rare maps and atlases, maps themselves are the treasure. “They tell history in a way you can’t get in any other art form,” he says while striding through his Manhattan gallery.

“Maps combine art, power, psychology, history, commerce, and fantasy. Take a look at this beauty.” The 60-year-old dealer opens an atlas titled Cosmographia. More than five centuries old, it features 32 woodcuts by Johannes Schnitzer, 27 of them based on the long-lost hand-drawn maps by Ptolemy, the second-century mathematician and geographer. Here is the Eurocentric known world, with Africa and Asia somewhat vaguely indicated. A Roman citizen living in Alexandria, Ptolemy drew a map useful enough–or at least ripe with enough “eloquent suggestion”–to inspire cartographers to copy it for well over a thousand years.

“The artist, Johannes Schnitzer of Armsheim, saw a version of Ptolemy’s map in either Spain or Italy and made these woodcuts in 1482 in Ulm, Germany,” Arader observes. “It’s a masterpiece. This is the first woodcut atlas, the first German atlas, with the first world map actually signed by the author. It contains the maps Columbus would have studied before his voyages. Think of it! I paid $825,000 for it at Sotheby’s New York more than ten years ago. It’s worth a lot more today. I’ll let you have it, at a slight discount, for just $1.8 million.”

Arader estimates his inventory at $600 million in rare prints, books, maps, and atlases. He has galleries in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Denver, Houston, and San Francisco, and his sumptuous six-story Beaux Arts town house at 1016 Madison Avenue is a showroom and home to Arader and his wife and children. When I arrive, he leads me to an unremarkable locked door, keys in the security code, and we are suddenly inside a vault the size of a narrow bedroom. Twelve-foot-high shelves are filled with hundreds of leather-and vellum-bound volumes.

We enter the vault at the center of the building. The smell of oiled leather bindings is intoxicating. “Many of these books haven’t been touched in 10 or 15 years. Sometimes I even forget what I own. Ah, here’s something great,” he says, pointing to a shelf bearing 11 copies of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by 16th-century Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius.

He places three atlases on a table, flipping them all open to the very same page. “These maps were made from 1570 onward during the Wars of Religion,” he notes. “Look, here’s a map of France under the reign of Charles IX, with Catherine de Medici as queen mother and Henry IV just offstage as the future great Huguenot king of Navarre, who eventually inherits the throne in 1589. What a story!”

Authenticity and condition are key to map and atlas prices. “Tears in the paper, oxidation of color, even the way the pages are trimmed determines value.” Arader points to the first atlas. “This one wasn’t colored. I paid $12,000 for it.” He taps the second open atlas. “Now here’s one with color. Not bad–in fact, quite good–but not the best.” He indicates the third: “Aha! Here’s an Ortelius atlas with excellent color. See how much deeper and richer it is? There’s a silvery delicacy to it. And that’s why I paid $300,000 for it.”

Graham Arader’s passion was sparked early in life by his map-collecting father. While an undergraduate at Yale, he says that he focused primarily on “blondes and squash”–he was captain of the squash team and allIvy League for three years–but his life changed when he met Alexander Orr Vietor, the curator of Yale’s map collection. “I am the only guy in history who used Yale as a trade school,” Arader says. “Mr. Vietor let me use his personal reference library and taught me the standards of collecting. I sold $100,000 in maps my senior year in college.”

In his book The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, Miles Harvey credits Arader with transforming what had long been an “insular realm of aficionados” by giving maps “unprecedented visibility, not only as investments…but as mass-media artifacts.”

Maybe so, but in those early days, Arader was the enfant terrible of the arcane world of rare books. Much the way trophy hunters display the horns of a prize buck but discard the carcass, Arader cut apart old atlases to retrieve and sell the maps separately, an unseemly practice that is known as book breaking. He acquired such books as Audubon’s Birds of America (a copy of which sold through Sotheby’s last December for about $11.5 million) and sold the 435 illustrations separately, for prices ranging from $4,000 for a small sparrow to $100,000 for a trumpeter swan. “I was a Visigoth in those days,” he admits. “It made people crazy. I don’t do that anymore.” If there is any justification for his barbarism, he insists that he was only making art more accessible to the public, freeing it from the dark prison of a shelved book: “Very few people–or institutions–can afford a book like Birds of America. But when individual prints are offered, the average collector can own a great work of art and display it on his wall.”

In addition to maps, Arader is a leading dealer in natural history prints, with a vast selection of Pierre-Joseph Redouté botanicals as well as North American Indian prints by George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. He’s also devoted his talents to battling the forces of evil in the art world and has developed a passion for nabbing book and map thieves.

He tells the story of Charles Lynn Glaser, for example, a bibliophile who went bad. “In 1974, Glaser goes to the Dartmouth library map room, steals eight valuable books, loads them into his car trunk, and then gets into a heated argument with the parking lot attendant,” Arader recalls. “He’s nailed and goes to jail.” Paroled after seven months, Glaser struck again, stealing two maps by Samuel de Champlain from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. The FBI asked Arader for assistance. “I was wearing a wire when I met him at a train station in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He knew me as a young dealer, and we talked for 20 minutes. Later he brought me the Champlain maps and was arrested. They threw the book at him–so to speak.”

Arader next fingered a rival map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley III, whom he had long suspected of stealing maps. “For 20 years I told everyone in the rare-book and map world that he was a crook, and everybody said to me, You just think that all the good maps are the ones you have,’” says Arader. “I was vindicated in 2005 when Smiley dropped an X-Acto knife on the floor of the Beinecke library at Yale and they nailed him. He’s since returned about $4 million worth of stuff, but he probably stole close to $100 million.”

One day you’re a Visigoth; the next day you’re working for the Feds. The allure of ancient maps, and their temptation, says Arader, is not only their beauty but their ability to leave viewers “surprised by the past and the future.”

A true connoisseur learns to appreciate the long view, a talent that also helps one to make it big in this rarefied business. The 1996 novel Original Color, by Hugh Kennedy, a former employee of Arader’s, depicted him as a pillaging “boss from hell.” “Hey,” says the dealer today, shrugging, “if you haven’t been skewered in a roman á clef, you’re no one, right? Actually, the novel was a pretty accurate picture of the book world. And I’m still friendly with Hugh.” 215-735-8811, aradergalleries.com